https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/26/climate/wind-solar-energy-workers.html Source:   By John Schwartz (photos by Brandon Thibodeaux, The New York Times. Excerpt: CLAWSON, UTAH — Chris Riley comes from a coal town and a coal family, but he founded a company that could hasten coal’s decline. Lee Van Horn, whose father worked underground in the mines, spends some days more than 300 feet in the air atop a wind turbine. They, and the other people in this story, represent a shift, not just in power generation but in generations of workers as well. They come from places where fossil fuels like coal provided lifelong employment for their parents, grandparents and neighbors. They found a different path, but not necessarily out of a deep environmental commitment. In America today there is more employment in wind and solar power than in mining and burning coal. And a job’s a job....  

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/emissions-growth-united-states-asia-fueled-record-carbon-levels-2018 Source:   By Benjamin Storrow, E&E News, Science News. Excerpt: Global carbon levels reached a record high last year, as surging demand for fossil fuels in the United States and Asia sent emissions soaring, the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris said today. The 33.1 gigatons of energy-related carbon dioxide reported in 2018 represents a 1.7% increase over the previous year. It also means emissions have risen in each of the first two full years since the signing of the Paris climate agreement, leaving the world far short of the 26% to 28% cut in emissions targeted by 2025. “We see that there is a growing disconnect between those calls and what is happening in the real markets,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a call announcing the findings [ https://www.eenews.net/assets/2019/03/26/document_cw_01.pdf ]. ...Surging energy consumption fueled by strong eco

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/climate/copenhagen-climate-change.html Source:   By Somini Sengupta, Photographs by Charlotte de la Fuente, The New York Times. Excerpt: COPENHAGEN — Can a city cancel out its greenhouse gas emissions? Copenhagen intends to, and fast. By 2025, this once-grimy industrial city aims to be net carbon neutral, meaning it plans to generate more renewable energy than the dirty energy it consumes. Here’s why it matters to the rest of the world: Half of humanity now lives in cities, and the vast share of planet-warming gases come from cities. The big fixes for climate change need to come from cities too. They are both a problem and a potential source of solutions. The experience of Copenhagen, home to 624,000 people, can show what’s possible, and what’s tough, for other urban governments on a warming planet. The mayor, Frank Jensen, said cities “can change the way we behave, the way we are living, and go more green.” His city has some advantages. It is sma

https://eos.org/articles/judge-blocks-oil-and-gas-leases-on-public-land-citing-climate-change Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: In a court ruling Tuesday, 19 March, a federal judge temporarily halted oil and gas leases on 300,000 acres (1,200 square kilometers) of public lands in Wyoming because the sale of the leases “did not sufficiently consider climate change.” The Obama administration had auctioned off the land in 2015 and 2016 for oil and gas exploration. The court decision pauses these sales and orders the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to redo its environmental assessment. “This decision is hugely significant,” Noel Healy, a professor of geography at Salem State University in Massachusetts, told Eos. “It could be used to challenge Trump’s plans to further fossil fuel production across the U.S.” ...“The Department of [the] Interior and BLM were willfully ignoring the climate consequences of oil and gas development across hundreds of thou

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/climate/climate-school-strikes.html Source:   By The New York Times. Excerpt: From Sydney to Seoul, Cape Town to New York, children skipped school en masse Friday to demand action on climate change. It was a stark display of the alarm of a generation. It was also a glimpse of the anger directed at older people who have not, in the protesters’ view, taken global warming seriously enough.... See also Eos article Youth Call for Action with Climate Strikes  https://eos.org/articles/youth-call-for-action-with-climate-strikes  

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/new-fuel-cell-could-help-fix-renewable-energy-storage-problem Source:   By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: If we want a shot at transitioning to renewable energy, we’ll need one crucial thing: technologies that can convert electricity from wind and sun into a chemical fuel for storage and vice versa.  ...In 2007, solar and wind provided just 0.8% of all power in the United States; in 2017, that number was 8%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. ...In sunny California, for example, solar panels regularly produce more power than needed in the middle of the day, but none at night, after most workers and students return home. Some utilities are beginning to install massive banks of batteries in hopes of storing excess energy and evening out the balance sheet. But batteries are costly and store only enough energy to back up the grid for a few hours at most. Another option is to store the energy by converting it

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/rain-melting-greenland-s-ice-even-winter-raising-fears-about-sea-level-rise Source:   By Alex Fox, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Rising global temperatures are making Greenland feel a bit more like the United Kingdom—and that’s bad news for the ice sheet that covers the massive arctic island. Rain is becoming more frequent, melting ice and setting the stage for far more melt in the future, according to a new study. Even more disturbing, researchers say, is that raindrops are pockmarking areas of the ice sheet even in the dead of winter and that as the climate warms, those areas will expand. ...Each year, the hot knife of climate change excises 270 billion tons of ice from Greenland’s more than 1.7-million-square-kilometer ice sheet. Between 1992 and 2011, all that lost ice raised global sea level roughly 7.5 millimeters. Roughly half of the ice loss in that period occurred at the ice sheet’s edge in the form of icebergs cleaving from glaciers an

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/improving-estimates-of-long-term-climate-sensitivity Source:   By Terri Cook, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: New modeling casts doubt on the suitability of running experiments with fixed sea surface temperatures to understand the effects of cloud aggregation on Earth’s climate. One of the fundamental metrics in climate change research is equilibrium climate sensitivity: the amount that Earth’s long-term, near-surface temperatures will change in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Previous research has shown that two spatially dependent processes—the variability of sea surface temperatures and the organization of initially scattered convection (known as convective aggregation)—largely control climate sensitivity by regulating feedbacks related to clouds and water vapor that can amplify or moderate Earth’s ability to radiate heat into space. ...aggregation could actually depend upon sea surface temperature patterns....

See source URLs below Source:    By NOAA. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8. Topics... 2018 was 4th hottest year on record for the globe [ https://www.noaa.gov/news/2018-was-4th-hottest-year-on-record-for-globe ]; Assessing the U.S. Climate in 2018 [ https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-201812 ]; 2018's Billion Dollar Disasters in Context [ https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2018s-billion-dollar-disasters-context ]; El Niño conditions are here [ https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/february-2019-enso-update-el-niño-conditions-are-here ]; Intense drought in the U.S. Southwest persisted through 2018 and into 2019 [ https://www.climate.gov/USdrought2018 ]; Ice shelves buckle under the weight of meltwater lakes [ https://cires.colorado.edu/news/ice-shelves-buckle-under-weight-meltwater-lakes ]; Wild weather on the West Coast in February 2019 [ https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/wild-weather-west-coast-february-2019 ]; Warmi

https://eos.org/features/the-dangers-of-glacial-lake-floods-pioneering-and-capitulation Source:   By Jane Palmer, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: In 1941, an ice avalanche triggered what is known as a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) from Lake Palcacocha. ...The flood killed an estimated 4,000 people in Huaraz, a third of its population at the time. Such GLOFs have plagued glaciated mountain ranges in places such as Canada, Italy, Nepal, and Bhutan, but the world’s most fatal GLOFs have occurred in Peru. ...Peruvian geologist Jorge Broggi deduced that the hazards developed after the end of the Little Ice Age, around 1850. The glacial lakes began to form as the climate naturally warmed, and as they grew, the stress on their natural dams of rocks and debris, or moraines, which sometimes have a core of melting ice, also grew. In 1951, when the Peruvian government realized the full extent of the problem, it launched the Control Commission of Cordillera Blanca Lakes to assess the situation and miti